Karzai’s April Fools?

Do they have April Fool’s Day in Afghanistan? Some observers wondered today upon seeing the headlines about President Hamid Karzai’s latest speech—as well they might. From the BBC: “Afghan president Karzai accuses UN over election fraud.” Oh, does he? It’s not news that there was fraud in the Afghan presidential elections last year; international observers, many of whom had dealt with shady voting on many continents, said that the first round, in August, was the worst they’d ever seen. There were “ghost” polling stations, with few voters but many votes registered; ballots not even separated from their printed bindings before being dumped in boxes; a lot of money changing hands. A million votes were thrown out, and those were just the ones whose falsity was too obvious to ignore—never mind the ballots that were bought and sold in an orderly manner. Karzai was the beneficiary of that fraud. The Obama Administration pressured him to accept a second, run-off round (no more than he was legally required to do) but when his closest opponent dropped out, realizing that he was just setting himself up to be cheated on again, the United States almost seemed relieved. We may be paying for that tolerance now. Karzai said today that the cheating had been “massive.” But:

This wasn’t fraud by Afghans but the fraud of foreigners, the fraud of Galbraith, or Morillon, and the votes of the Afghan nation were in the control of an embassy.

That’s Philippe Morillon, the head of the European Union’s observers team, and Peter Galbraith, who was then the deputy head of the United Nations, and to whom the possibility of an April Fool’s joke occurred as well, except that, as he told the BBC,

I realized I don’t have that kind of warm, personal relationship with President Karzai that he would do that.

Who does have that sort of relationship with Karzai? Our President, who sat down with Karzai and his dodgy vice-president Mohammed Fahim earlier this week to cajole them into fighting corruption, and asked Karzai to come for a visit? The warmth from that meeting, if there was any, seems to have turned into heat. The Los Angeles Times described the speech as “angry” and “incendiary,” and the New York Times called it “extraordinarily harsh,” adding that it “seemed more a measure of Mr. Karzai’s mood in the wake of Mr. Obama’s visit.” And it wasn’t just about the elections; Karzai, the Times reported,

accused the Western coalition fighting here to shore up his government of being on the verge of becoming invaders—a term usually used by insurgents when they refer the American, British and other NATO troops….

“In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and cooperation-assistance,” said Mr. Karzai, adding that if the perception spread of the west being invaders and the Afghan government being their mercenaries, the insurgency “could become a national resistance.”

Why are our soldiers dying to keep in power a man who talks about them that way, and who, in his own political interests, seems willing to condone attacks on them? (And that is apart from the matter of his regime’s and his family’s corruption.) In his column yesterday, Thomas Friedman called attention to Karzai’s “virulently anti-U.S.” rhetoric, and offered one of his personal rules:

In the Middle East, what leaders tell you in private in English is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language.

In terms of Afghanistan, Friedman has a point. (Friedman also drew a parallel between Karzai and Nguyen Cao Ky—not Ngo Dinh Diem? He was the one with the corrupt brother.) Afghans are not the only ones who should be wary of the presence of American troops in Afghanistan. Americans should be, too. It might make sense to get our men and women out of there before we spend another April as fools for Karzai.

Whether or not there’s an April Fool’s Day in Afghanistan, The New Yorker is not neglecting the day, the month, or fools. See Macy Halford on the problem with April, and Judith Thurman on an Italian journalist’s fake interviews. If only those Karzai quotes had come from a conversation with him—but they are real.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.